Back Where I Came From E-Book

A. J. Liebling

• Herausgeber: Reading Essentials
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

A collection of New Yorker columns describes the ups and downs of life in New York in the 1930s and some of the unusual people who made the city the way it was, written by one of the best-known and most widely admired journalists of his generation and times. 

Leseprobe

Back Where I Came From 

by A. J. Liebling

First published in 1938

This edition published by Reading Essentials

Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany

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Back Where I Came From 

 by 

 A. J. Liebling

To Ann

APOLOGY FOR BREATHING

People I know in New York are incessantly on the point of going back where they came from to write a book, or of staying on and writing a book about back where they came from. Back where they came from, I gather, is the American scene (New York, of course, just isn’t America). It is all pretty hard on me because I have no place to go back to. I was born in an apartment house at Ninety-third Street and Lexington Avenue, about three miles from where I now live. Friends often tell me of their excitement when the train on which they are riding passes from Indiana into Illinois, or back again. I am ashamed to admit that when the Jerome Avenue express rolls into Eighty-sixth Street station I have absolutely no reaction.

I always think of back where my friends came from as one place, possessing a homogeneous quality of not being New York. The thought has been well expressed by my literary adviser, Whitey Bimstein, who also trains prizefighters. I once asked him how he liked the country. He said, “It is a nice spot.” I have been to the country myself. I went to a college in New Hampshire. But I seldom mention this, because I would like to be considered quaint and regional, like Jesse Stuart or Kenneth Roberts.

The finest thing about New York City, I think, is that it is like one of those complicated Renaissance clocks where on one level an allegorical marionette pops out to mark the day of the week, on another a skeleton death bangs the quarter hour with his scythe, and on a third the Twelve Apostles do a Cakewalk. The variety of the sideshows distracts one’s attention from the advance of the hour hand. I know people who say that, as in the clock, all the exhibits depend upon the same movement. This they insist is economic. But they are the sort of people who look at a fine woman and remind you that the human body is composed of one dollar and sixty-two cents worth of chemicals.[1]

I like to think of all the city microcosms so nicely synchronized though unaware of one another: the worlds of the weight-lifters, yodelers, tugboat captains and sideshow barkers, of the book-dutchers, sparring partners, song pluggers, sporting girls and religious painters, of the dealers in rhesus monkeys and the bishops of churches that they establish themselves under the religious corporations law. It strengthens my hold on reality to know when I awake with a brandy headache in my house which is nine blocks due south of the Chrysler Building and four blocks due east of the Empire State, that Eddie Arcaro, the jockey, is galloping a horse around the track at Belmont while Ollie Thomas, a colored clocker of my acquaintance, is holding a watch on him. I can be sure that Kit Coates, at the Aquarium, is worrying over the liverish deportment of a new tropical fish, that presently Whitey will be laying out the gloves and headguards for the fighters he trains at Stillman’s gymnasium, while Miss Ira, the Harlem modiste, will be trying to talk a dark-complexioned girl out of buying herself an orange turban and Hymie the Tummler ruminates a plan for opening a new night club. It would be easier to predicate the existence of God on such recurrences than on the cracking of ice in ponds, the peeping of spring peepers in their peeperies and the shy green sprigs of poison ivy so well advertised by writers like Thoreau.

There are New Yorkers so completely submerged in one environment, like the Garment Centre or Jack and Charlie’s, that they live and die oblivious of the other worlds around them. Others are instinctively aware of the wonders of New York natural history, but think them hardly worthy of mention. My father was a New Yorker of the latter sort. In separate phases of his business life, he had occasion to retain Monk Eastman, a leading prewar gangster, and the Rev. Charles Parkhurst, a notorious crusader against vice. This seemed to him no more paradoxical than going to Coward’s for his shoes while he bought his hats of Knox. When Father was President of an association of furriers during a strike he hired Eastman to break up a strikers’ mass meeting. His employment of Dr. Parkhurst was more subtle. In about 1910 Father bought some real estate in West Twenty-sixth Street on which he purposed to put several loft buildings. He believed that the fur industry was going to move up in that direction from below Twenty-third. But Twenty-sixth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues was full of brothels, and there was no hope of getting tenants for the new buildings until the block was made respectable. First Father dispossessed the hock shops from the houses which he had acquired with his building lots. But the watchmen rented the empty rooms to the drabs for fifty cents a night. Then Father made a substantial gift to Dr. Parkhurst’s society, enclosing with his check a letter that called attention to the sinful conditions on West Twenty-sixth Street. Dr. Parkhurst raised Hell with the police, who made the girls move on to another block, and then Father put up his buildings. Father always said Monk and Dr. Parkhurst gave him his money’s worth, but he never liked either of them. He became labor conscious after he retired from business, and toward the end of his life often said that unions were a fine thing, but that they had doubtless changed a lot since the time he hired Eastman. He died a staunch Roosevelt man.

Even though he made his home during the second part of his life among middle-class enterprisers with horizons slimmer than a gnat’s waist, Father lived in other milieus in retrospect. He liked to talk of the lower East Side in the eighties, when the carters left their wagons in the streets of nights and the small boys would roll the wains away and burn them on election day, and of how he, a workingman at ten, boxed with the other furriers’ apprentices using beaver muffs for mitts. He would even tell of the gay life of London and Paris and Leipzig in the late nineties when he was a bachelor buyer, although, he always protested, he had finished with that sort of thing when he got married. And he early introduced me to those worlds into which one may escape temporarily for the payment of a fee, the race course and the baseball park. These have their own conflicts that do not follow scenarios pre-determined in Hollywood.

Since this is a regional book about people I met back where I came from, I should like to say something here about the local language. This is a regional tongue imported from the British Isles, as is the dialect spoken by the retarded inhabitants of the Great Smoky Mountains back where they come from. Being spoken by several million people, it has not been considered of any philological importance. Basically, New Yorkese is the common speech of early nineteenth-century Cork, transplanted during the mass immigration of the South Irish a hundred years ago. Of this Cork dialect Thomas Crofton Croker in 1839 wrote: “The vernacular of this region may be regarded as the ancient cockneyism of the mixed race who held the old city—Danes, English and Irish. It is a jargon, whose principal characteristic appears in the pronunciation of th, as exemplified in dis, dat, den, dey—this, that, then, they; and in the dovetailing of words as, ‘kum our rish’ for ‘come of this.’ ” New York example, “gerradahere” for “get out of here.” The neo-Corkonian proved particularly suited to the later immigrants who came here from continental Europe—the th sound is equally impossible for French, Germans and Italians. Moreover, it was impressed upon the latecomers because it was the talk of the police and the elementary school teachers, the only Americans who would talk to them at all. Father, who was born in Austria but came here when he was seven years old, spoke New Yorkese perfectly.

It is true that since the diaspora the modern dialects of Cork and New York have diverged slightly like Italian and Provencal, both of which stem from vulgar Latin. Yet Sean O’Faolain’s modern story of Cork, “A Born Genius,” contains dialogue that might have come out of Eleventh Avenue: “He’s after painting two swans on deh kitchen windes. Wan is facin’ wan way and d’oder is facin’ d’oder way.—So dat so help me God dis day you’d tink deh swans was floatin’ in a garden! And deh garden was floatin’ in trough deh winda! And dere was no winda!”

There are interesting things about New York besides the language. It is one of the oldest places in the United States, but doesn’t live in retrospect like the professionally picturesque provinces. Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten. There were plenty of clipper ships out of New York in the old days and privateers before them, but there are better ships out of here today. The Revolution was fought all over town, from Harlem to Red Hook and back again, but that isn’t the revolution you will hear New Yorkers discussing now.

Native New Yorkers are the best mannered people in America; they never speak out of turn in saloons, because they have experience in group etiquette. Whenever you hear a drinker let a blat out of him you can be sure he is a recent immigrant from the south or middle west. New Yorkers are modest. It is a distinction for a child in New York to be the brightest on one block; he acquires no exaggerated idea of his own relative intelligence. Prairie geniuses are raced in cheap company when young. They are intoxicated by the feel of being boy wonders in Amarillo, and when they bounce off New York’s skin as adults they resent it.

New York women are the most beautiful in the world. They have their teeth straightened in early youth. They get their notions of chic from S. Klein’s windows instead of the movies. Really loud and funny New Yorkers, like Bruce Barton, are invariably carpetbaggers. The climate is extremely healthy. The death rate is lower in Queens and the Bronx than in any other large city in the United States, and the average life expectancy is so high that one of our morning newspapers specializes in interviewing people a hundred years old and upward. The average is slightly lowered, however, by the inlanders who come here and insist on eating in Little Southern Tea Roomes on side streets.

The natives put up with a lot back here where I came from. If the inhabitants of Kentucky are distrustful of strangers, that is duly noted as an entertaining local trait. But if a New Yorker says that he doesn’t like Kentuckians he is marked a cold churl. It is perennially difficult for the New Yorker who subscribes to a circulating library to understand how the city survived destruction during the Civil War. When he reads about those regional demigods haunted by ancestral daemons and festooned in magnolia blossoms and ghosts who composed practically the whole Confederate Army, he wonders what happened to them en route. I asked Whitey Bimstein what he thought of that one. He said: “Our guys must have slapped their ears down.” Whitey does not know that we have been paying a war indemnity ever since in the form of royalties.

A. J. Liebling

Block Island, 1938

[1]

The author has not checked on this figure.—The Editor

BEGINNING WITH THE UNDERTAKER

In the middle of any New York block there is likely to be one store that remains open and discreetly lighted all night. This is the undertaker’s. The undertaker or an assistant is always in attendance, waiting for something to turn up. Undertakers are sociable men; they welcome company during their unavoidable periods of idleness. High school boys study for their State Regents’ examinations in undertakers’ offices on hot June nights. The door is always open, the electric fan soothing, the whole environment more conducive to reflective scholarship than the crowded apartment where the boy lives. Policemen going off duty sometimes drop in for a visit with the undertaker before climbing into the subway for the long trip home to another part of the city.

There is no merchandise in the front part of an undertaker’s store. Usually there are a few comfortable chairs for bereaved relatives, and policemen sit in these chairs. During the day, the undertaker acts as a referee in the disputes of children. Housewives tell him their troubles; priests appeal to him to head church committees. Ten to one he becomes the biggest man in the neighborhood, like my friend Mayor Angelo Rizzo of Mulberry Street. Some New York streets have Mayors, but they are not elected. A man lives on a street until the mayoralty grows over him, like a patina. To Mayor Rizzo Elizabeth Street, although but two blocks east of Mulberry, is an alien place. For the feast of San Gennaro, who is the Mulberry Street Saint, Mayor Rizzo usually heads at least three committees and festoons his shopfront with electric lights. A celebration on Elizabeth Street leaves him unmoved. “Just one of them Sicilian saints,” he says.

Once Mayor Rizzo told me he was hard put to keep track of his constituents’ baths. “I think I will have to get a secretary,” he said, as he improved the taste of a casket salesman’s gift cigar with a swig of iced barbera wine. He sat in front of 178 Mulberry Street, enthroned upon one of the elegant portable chairs which he is prepared to furnish in any number for correct funerals. “They should call this cigar a La Palooka,” he remarked on the side.

“Mrs. Aranciata is getting crazy because she don’t remember whether Jimmy has been to Cooney[1] Island twenty-two times or twenty-three times. So she come to me and said I should tell the kid not to go no more, because maybe that will make it an even number of times and he will get rheumatism. So I said to her, ‘But suppose he has been only twenty-two times? Then by keeping him home you will be preventing him getting on the odd number again, and the rheumatism will be your fault.’

“ ‘Oh, Madonna mia,’ she says, ‘and what will I do?’

“So I says, ‘Why don’t you forget all about it and purtend this is a new year. Start all over again and when he goes to Cooney tell me, and I will keep track of it on a piece of paper.’ So she is delighted and the next thing I know she tells all her friends and now I got about fourteen women coming in wanting me to keep score how many times the family goes swimming.

“It is like when I feed one cat spaghetti a couple of winters ago and in a week I got a waiting line of 598 cats, including a lot of Sicilian cats from Elizabeth Street.”

“But what difference does it make how many times you go swimming—at Coney or any place else?” I asked.

“What difference does it make?” shouted Mr. Rizzo. “Do you mean to tell me that you, an educated man, do not know that salt-water baths are only good for you if you go an odd number of times? Any old woman on Mulberry Street knows that much.”

To prove his point Mayor Rizzo called the cop on the beat.

“You are an Italian,” said His Honor. “Which is it lucky to take baths, an odd number or an even number?”

“Odd number,” answered the officer promptly. “My mother-in-law, she keeps count on her fingers. She would never go in the water two times, or four times, in an afternoon, but always three times or five times.”

The argument became a little involved here. Some of the folklore hydrotherapists held that each immersion counts as a bath, and if you go in the drink an odd number of times at each visit to the beach, your health will not suffer.

Others maintain that you must keep track of the total number of days’ bathing, and be sure to wind up the season on an odd.

“I remember when I was a kid an old lady from Calabria made me go in fifty-one times one summer,” said Al Gallichio, the restaurant man.

An antique and gracious lady waddling past with a bag of zucchini, was invoked as a superior authority.

“Pardon me, madame,” said Mayor Rizzo, “but I would wish to request a word with you.”

“Voluntarily,” she replied.

“When you are accustomed to go bathing, which is the more auspicious, to go an even or an uneven number of times?”

“Childish,” said the dame. “It makes no difference. But once you have begun to go you must go at least fifteen times, else your bones rot. It is for that reason I have not gone to the sea, this year, because I might not be able to afford fifteen visits.”

She was an exception, because the odd-and-even belief, in one or other of its two forms, is prevalent all the way from Bleecker Street down to Park Row.

“It is very important this year,” said the Mayor, “because we got no public bath in the neighborhood. There used to be a bathhouse on Center Market Place where the fellow would let you take a shower for a nickel. Of course, even the old-timers do not count whether a shower is odd or even. But now the Broome St. Tamanacle[2] Church has bought the building. A lot of these old houses have no bathtubs even, so the nearest place the people can get a bath is Allen Street and they figure they might just as well go out to Cooney.

“Do I believe in this odd-and-even business?” he said, “Well, I tell you. I went swimming off the Battery just once, which is an odd number, and a kid pushed my head under and nearly drowned me, so I figured if I went back that would be an even number and even worse luck and I probably would remain drowned, so now I do all my swimming in a bathtub.”

[1]

This is the New York pronunciation of Coney Island. It seems to me as noteworthy as the Texan fashion of saying “Hughston” for Houston.

[2]

A regional pronunciation of Tabernacle.

THE SEA IN THE CITY

“Where did I go to sea from? The First Ward.”

—TOM WILSON.

Before it was anything else New York was a seaport, and before anything else it still is. The immigrants who came here from Europe had a good idea of that, but most of their children have forgotten it; as for the immigrants from inland America, they apparently never knew it. New Yorkers read of London River and Liverpool. They think of Nantucket and Provincetown and Gloucester as towns with a nautical atmosphere, or of New Bedford as the home of a marine tradition. But they don’t realize that the fellow next to them in the subway is just as likely a second engineer off a freighter as a certified public accountant employed by Dunkelbinner & Follywinkle in the Jacob Ruppert Building. The Manhattan waterfront is not hard to find. You start in any direction and walk. But psychic barriers block it off from the rest of the city. The foot of Wall Street is as nautical as The Nigger of the Narcissus, but a block away nobody thinks of anything more seaworthy than Warner Brothers, Preferred. The great liners dock within a few blocks of the Casa Manana. Nobody gives a damn.

As good a place as any to get the feel of the port is the office of the Kennedy Towing Line at 32 South Street. It is the last old-fashioned tugboat office left. The bigger lines have gone down to buildings like 24 State and 17 Battery Place, where they employ female stenographers and rub elbows with transatlantic steamship companies. But a pot-bellied iron stove still overheats the Kennedy office from early fall until late spring, and a gay blue and white portrait of the tug “Idlewild,” with more paint than perspective, provides its chief adornment. Of the six Kennedy boats two were built before 1875. It is Tom Wilson’s favorite office for yarning.

Tom is the senior tugboat master of the harbor, with a voice on him like the Staten Island Ferry boat and a chest like an oil drum.

“I am 74 years old,” he roars, “and I can jump out of that window and jump right back again.” The office is on the second floor. “When they put me together they put me together right,” says Tom, heaving on a handful of snow white hair. “Every hair drove in with a nail. None of your shin plasters.

“I went tug-boatin’ when I was 18, aboard of the Leonard Richards, the twin of that Idlewild in the pitcher. Where did I go to sea from? The First Ward. Tugboat captains was the cream of society in them days. They wore high hats and gold watch chains and Prince Albert coats and striped trousers, and they never touched the wheel without kid gloves. They would steal the sight out of your eyes.

“The Leonard Richards was a Hooker. What was a Hooker? Why, a tug that cruised off Sandy Hook for schooners, of course. Just the same as a Gater was a tug that hanged off Hell Gate, and a lugger was a tug that lugged ships to their berths after the Hookers and the Gaters brought them in, whether the ships was pinewooders from the South, or brickers, or whatever they might be.

“Them days there was more ships than now, and plenty of sail. The most part of them had no regular agents ashore to hire tugs, and there was no radio, anway, so the agents wouldn’t a’ knowed when they was coming in. The first tug that seed a ship he made up to her and the two captains paced their deck awhile and called each other this and that and at last they struck a bargain, or they didn’t, and you sheered off and he run up the American flag for another tug.

“But the tug that got out first had the best chance. So sometimes at night the captain would shake you by the shoulder and say, ‘Get up and cast off with no noise,’ and you would try to give the other boats the shake and get out to sea before they was wise. You would go out without lights, by Rockaway or South Beach or Coney Island, where you knowed there was nothing you could hit only maybe an oyster boat, and you wouldn’t stop for that.

“Sometimes when you would get out in the stream you would hear the whistles tooting if they suspicioned you, and the whole gang would be after you.

“Then, if the old man was wise, he would switch his running lights. He would put his red and green lights astern and his white light on the bow, and it would look like he was coming in instead of going out. But if the other guy was wise he wouldn’t take none of that—just give her more medicine.

“We would cruise off the Hook two or three days. We would carry that much coal, but only water for twenty hours, steady steaming; but we could get water at the Hook, but not coal. How far did we go? Half way to Ireland, boy—half way to Ireland. Ten per cent of what he got was for the captain, besides what he could steal, and if he didn’t get no tow he didn’t get no wages.

“Thirty or forty hours at a stretch working was nothing. The first command I got, after I got my license in 1883, I asked my owner for some bedding so’s the men could lay down. ‘I didn’t hire them men to sleep,’ he says. I can work thirty hours right now without squealing, and on my hoofs, too.

“Then when you would get out there sometimes there would be a good wind and they would sail right past you, and maybe offer you a line.

“But when the wind died they had a different tune.

“Once I picked up a French bark off Fire Island, and I couldn’t make a price with him. I follied him and I follied him, and at Long Beach, sure enough he goes ashore. Now I had him, I figured, and he would pay me a damn good price to pull him off. Up comes a nor’west gale, and what does the sucker do but back her off under sail! Ah, well, heartaches in every trade.

“But one time they wouldn’t bargain was the war. That was the golden age. All I had to do was cruise down by the Highlands on a calm day and take my pick of the schooners and barks that was bringing supplies to New York. I would make up to the one that looked the best bet.

“ ‘Morning, captain,’ I would tell the old man. ‘Seed anything of a submarine around here?’

“ ‘My God!’ he would say. ‘So close to New York?’

“ ‘Shelled a ship up by Hoffman’s Island this morning,’ I would say.

“ ‘How much to take me in?’

“ ‘Fifteen hundred dollars.’

“ ‘You’re a pirate. I’ll not pay it.’

“ ‘Very good, captain. Sorry we can’t do business, captain. But I ain’t got no time to waste out here. I don’t want to lose this little craft or the few lives I got on board.’

“I’d start off, and five minutes later he’d be signaling for me to come back and tow him at my price.

“When I’d get him up to Quarantine I’d drop him. ‘If you want to go any further,’ I’d say, ‘get a local. This is an express.’ ”

It was during the war that Tom performed his greatest feat of pilotage.

The Swash Channel, between Homer Shoal and Flynn’s Knoll, two treacherous shallows, is charted good for twenty feet of water.

“I took a five-masted bark, the Orleans, up there, drawing twenty-four and a half,” Tom said pridefully. “When I got her through Morgan, the captain, nearly went crazy.

“ ‘Why the hell did you take her through there?’ he asks.

“ ‘I knowed the tide, and I knowed the spot. You didn’t bump, did you?’

“ ‘No, but if that hawser had parted, or if something had gone wrong with that little boat, she would have been left dry and broke her back sure.’

“The reason I done it, of course, was I saved three miles instead of going round by the Main Ship Channel, and I was running short of water.”

Tom says he never knew a harbor thief.

“I knew some that had the name of it,” he said, “but I could not give you their pedigree. There were stories of some fellows that would go out in a schooner and make a price to bring her in. Then they would wait until night, and any tug they found at the end of a pier they would just take it and do the job and get their cash, and then leave the tug at the nearest slip and think no more of it.

“But taking gear, now, that is something else again. Anything that was not nailed to the boat, in the old days, the owner was not considered entitled to it.”

The cow, he roared . . .

The story of the sea cow is Captain Bob Forsythe’s masterpiece—the choicest fruit of a long experience in steam navigation, and well he knows it.

Captain Forsythe is a limber and lean-faced towboater from Kingston on the Hudson, “which has produced more steamboat men than I daresay any town in the United States.” (“Canawler,” snorts Tom Wilson.) But he has plied the waters of the Harbor and the Sound so long that he feels at home in the office of the Kennedy Line.

“It was during prohibition,” ” Captain Forsythe always begins, as one who would say, “it was during the civil war.”

“We was lying at the foot of Sackett Street, Brooklyn, when I seed the man that owned the boat coming along with what I thought was a big Newfoundland dog, and then I made out this bull, whatever t’hell he was—a cow.”

Captain Forsythe pronounced “cow” with a quality of bitterness such as towboat men generally reserve for the pilots of ferryboats, and he also got into his tone a suggestion that he had moved all his life in a different social sphere from cows, that he hardly knew what a cow was, and that he would feel himself degraded by the acquisition of such knowledge.

“We had a big open lighter that had belonged to the Navy,” he said, “and we had it loaded with provisions and coal and slops that we was to take out to a rum boat at sea east of Block Island, and bring back 4,000 cases of booze.

“Well, all would have been well, but the bootlegger conceived the idea to send this cow out to the ship so he would give the boys fresh milk, and then when they wanted meat they would kill him. The minute the cow seed me he let a roar out of him, and we had a big time making him walk down a plank into the lighter. Then when we got him aboard he liked to kick our brains out, but we made his legs fast and stowed him by the rail.

“We even shipped a bale of hay, which is fuel for them damn animals.

“We cast and went out by Hell Gate, and there was a fog in the Sound that you couldn’t see a hundred yards in front of you, it was perfect. She was so deep in the water with coal, and no deck onto her, just an open lighter, the sharks come swimming right up on the side to visit with the cow. If we had good sense we would have thrown him overboard. But we amused ourselves feeding loaves of bread to the sharks instead. She shipped some water, but everything would have been all right if it wasn’t for this cow.

“He began to beller so we didn’t need no fog horn. I bet you could hear him in Boston. And sure enough we get a hail—one of those Coast Guard four stackers out of New London. They send an officer aboard and I give him a line that I am taking provisions to an Isthmian Line boat at Boston, but he says the Isthmian does not run any boats to Boston.

“ ‘Turn her around and folly us into New London,’ he says.

“ ‘You’re only a public servant,’ I says, ‘this is piracy and damn impudence, and if you want to take her into New London you can run her yourself.’ So I called up my engineer and the firemen, and we sat with our arms folded on top of the canned goods, and cursed the cow who continued his impersonation of a whistle buoy. They put the crew aboard, but so much water came over the side that they couldn’t keep steam on her. The steering gear locked, and she nearly rammed the destroyer.

“They had to tow her into New London, and the further they towed the madder they got, until by the time they docked her the only one in the party that was pleased with himself was the cow.

“Of course they didn’t really have anything on us, because we had not been out there to get the rum yet, and there wasn’t a drop aboard, but still and all nobody would acknowledge ownership, fearing some kind of a tangle with the law, and meanwhile me and my crew was stranded. The bootlegger that owned the boat wouldn’t send us a penny. The Coast Guard wouldn’t release the boat until some owner turned up, and we stayed aboard hoping to collect our pay.

“To keep going I sold the coal off her, and then the provisions, and at last there was nothing left but this here bull, whatever it was, a cow, and I hated him more every time I looked at him. We were tied up at a dock in the Thames River, a high dock, and it was low water, and we were way below level. I goes ashore and looks for a farmer, and sure enough, the second field I look into I find one.”

Captain Forsythe pronounced “farmer” in much the same manner as “cow,” but with slightly less acerbity.

“ ‘Do you want to buy a cow?’ I asks him.

“ ‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘Where is it?’

“ ‘Come with me,’ I says. He follies me onto the dock and I show him the cow in the lighter.

“ ‘How much do you want for him?’ he says.

“ ‘Fifty dollars,’ I asks him, guessing at the value.

“ ‘I’ll give you fifty dollars for him,’ he says, ‘delivered on the dock.’

“I says, ‘Give me the fifty and I’ll have him on the dock in five minutes.’ So he gives me the fifty and I went aboard and we made a couple of belly bands and put them around the cow and lifted him with the steam hoist, meaning to put him down on the dock, but when I got the cow up and started to lower away, the power stopped, and there was the cow dangling a good fifteen feet above the dock. Up comes my engineer. “ ‘I stopped her,’ he says, ‘because there’s no more rope on the drum. She’s block to block. How will we get rid of the cow?’ he says. ‘I’ll show you,’ I says.

“With that I grabbed an axe and cut through the cable with one wallop. The bull, whatever t’hell he was, a cow, came flying through the air and landed on his four feet like a cat, and up the hill into New London, making a good eighteen knots, and the farmer after him. And that was the last I seed of either one.”

Henry Hudson warn’t going nowhere . . .

New York is more than a port on the ocean. It is a great river town, and when Hudson River men stand up to a West Side bar with harbor towboat men and deep-water sailors, three marine cultures meet without mingling. So, in Minoan Crete, the barbaric Greek seamen, the native cockney stock and the Phoenician A.B.’s must have quaffed their inferior beer while indulging in a round robin of contempt. Most harbor towboat men are of native city stock. River men are born in places like Kingston and Athens up the Hudson. Kingston men usually are pilots. Engineers belong to Athens, which is pronounced Aythens. The river men are of an America which is not New York. They say “narthing” when they mean “nothing.” Harbor men say “nuttin.” The Mississippi is said to breed bombast, but Hudson River men have a gift of understatement which is a more effective medium for remarkable lies. This is known as the deadpan or London Times system of prevarication. The Hudson is a river where wise men spawn. Arrived at maturity they go down to the sea in towboats. Judge from this story of Captain Billy Barnett’s.

“I remember when I was a lad,” Captain Billy once told me—he’s almost eighty now—“I shipped in the schooner Benjamin Akin, carrying bluestone from Roundout Creek to Mount Vernon. We had to pass up Eastchester Creek to deliver our cargo, and the old man had never been up there so he hove to and waited for a pilot.

“After a piece an old feller come along and ‘Captain,’ he says, ‘are you in want of a pilot? I been taking vessels up this creek all my life and I never been on a rock yet.’

“ ‘I’ll be damned if I believe you know where the rocks are, then,’ says the old man, and he wouldn’t have him. Along come another old feller. ‘Ever been on the rocks?’ asks the old man. ‘Been on every goddam rock in the creek,’ he says. ‘You’re the man for me,’ says the old man. ‘You got experience.’

“When I was a boy,” Captain Barnett remarked on another occasion, “it snowed and it blowed and it hailed and it made ice. The old Norwich, of the Cornell Steamboat Company was built in 1836 and she was the greatest icebreaker on the river. She had a cross-head engine like the original Clermont and a high bow, and she would run way up on the ice and crash down on it, and sometimes she would fall over on her side.

“Then she’d sort of shake herself and get up and come down on that ice like a terrier worrying a rat and she’d clear a course through twenty inches of ice like a man would eat a buckwheat cake. Yes, sir, she was a remarkable boat.” The antithesis of a remarkable boat, in Captain Billy’s language, is “a boat that couldn’t draw a shad out of a net,” or “couldn’t draw the slack out of a line.”

The Hudson made New York, for after the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825[1] and before the completion of the railroads into the West, all the produce of the Lakes region came through the canal and down the Hudson to this port, and all the merchandise from civilization went back up that way. By the time the railroads got going New York had such a headstart on the other centres of regional culture that the city has been on the chinstrap since, tincanning a mile in front of the field and without a challenger in sight. Hudson River men even today like to remind New Yorkers that the Hudson gave our town its bust at the gate.

The longest voyage I ever made into inland America was on the Trojan of the Albany Night Line.[2] I got to Albany. That was far enough for Henry Hudson so I decided it was far enough for me. I came home. Captain George Warner was the commander of the Trojan then and he was very angry because the river was so full of lights and aids to navigation.

“Dangerous having all these lights,” he said. “Fellows get used to ’em. Might go out any time. Weakens their estimation.” We were up in the pilot house and there were no lights there except the one on the compass.

“From here we run almost straight across the river, to a place called Snedeker’s,” the Captain said. I asked what light he ran to there.

“To where we can see a hollow in the hills, and if there is fog we have the course timed; so given the tide and the speed of the boat we could run it in the dark. Estimation,” remarked Captain Warner. “Three things makes up a steamboat man: estimation, calculation and judgment. You estimate where you are, you calculate how fast you are going and then you use your judgment. But soon there will be no boatmen. No boatmen and no steamboats. Only Sandy Hook pilots riding theirselves up to Albany in blamed tankers.”

A long, dark dragon loomed in the middle of the stream, lights at her stern and masthead.

“They anchor at night,” said Captain Warner. He meant the Sandy Hook pilots.

“When I went lookout,” Captain Warner continued, “river men steered by a ball on the for’ard flagstaff. It was a big ball that slid up and down on the staff by ropes. The steersman would sight by it like a gunsight. A steersman shifts his position, of course, but the ball was steady.

“He’d get it against a church steeple, or a hill, or a sawmill, or a certain formation o’trees, and he’d set his course according. ‘H’ist her up!’ he’d call to the lookout, or ‘H’ist her down!’ according to how he wanted it. The lookout stood out there on the bows, where he could see ahead.”

Night closed down on the Trojan. Twilight had remained behind in Haverstraw Bay, which all rivermen pronounce “Har-verstraw.”

The quartermaster began to play the searchlight. He flashed it on residences on the Highlands. Almost every one flashed on the porch lights in response.

“There was once a divorce suit based on that light,” the skipper reminisced. “Quartermaster turned it on one of those summer places. Husband was in the house and the light just hit his wife and his friend in a compromising situation. Well, they subpoenaed the quartermaster. ‘Very sorry it happened,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have done that to nobody for the world.’ Went ashore and took to farming. He was a very tender-hearted fellow.”

In 1849 ten steamboats left New York for Albany every morning and an equal number at night. Each of these steamers teamed with a boat coming down from Albany. Also there were a dozen local lines running to intermediate ports, like Poughkeepsie, Sing Sing, Kingston, Saugerties and Catskill.

Now there’s one boat by day and one at night. The railroads have taken most of the passenger business.

“Some things about the river’d surprise you,” says Captain Warner. “Now there’s a tug, puffing like she had the asthmy, with six barges astern.

“Now take that tug. With a tow of ten barges she could make maybe five miles an hour. Well, you’d think maybe with one barge she could go ten times as fast. But she couldn’t. S’prise you, wouldn’t it? It would s’prise you, if we got past this cliff. River makes a perfect S here, and if you didn’t know the way out, you’d turn back.”

This was at West Point. I asked, “How did Henry Hudson find his way up?”

“Because he warn’t going nowhere, of course,” said the skipper.

George Fox Clapp, Captain Warner’s purser, had been on the river fifty years. In 1883 he was purser of the St. John, then rated a floating palace.

“The river was the fashionable route to Saratoga in those days,” the purser said as the Trojan glided on past Pollopel’s Island in Newburgh Bay. “Isaac Murphy, the great colored jockey, and William Whitney, the Secretary of the Navy; Snapper Garrison and John Morrissey, the old tough turned gambler; Richard Canfield and Jim Corbett and Charlie Mitchell and half of society would be aboard the night after the getaway from the New York tracks.

“The black stable boys stayed on deck and shot craps all night long and the bar stayed open until 2 in the morning. The dining saloon in those old boats was below decks. Wine parties sometimes lasted all night. The St. John had a beautiful ornate staircase of carved mahogany inlaid with white holly. How the ladies loved to walk down it—the pretty ones, especially!

“During August all the talk you heard was of racing. The air was full of tips—and the horses owe me $300 since 1887. I married then and quit betting.

“In the early spring we had the legislators travelling back and forth between Albany and New York. They all had passes in those days. I don’t think we ever had professional gamblers on the Hudson boats like on the Mississippi. There wasn’t time to make acquaintance and build up the victim’s confidence by letting him win small sums.

“But a purser’s life never was a pure delight, even then. I remember one snowy night on the Dean Richmond—I was on her after the Drew—the chief steward and I had to deliver a woman. The old man put the boat into Rhinebeck, but we couldn’t find a physician at that hour. So we did the trick. It was a nice boy, and the woman named him Dean Richmond.”

The purser sauntered towards his cabin on the saloon deck. Captain Warner spoke again.

“Not a sail on this river,” he said. “Was a time when it was all sloops. Before my time. It cost $14 to go from Tivoli to New York. Took ’em a week, sometimes. And then later there was a rate war between steamers and the rate got down to ten cents, New York to Albany. Then old Dan’l Drew and the Peoples Line they bought out the opposition. And they made a lot of money. A mint of money. Cripes, what a lot of money they made. Good money came out of this river. They piled up the silver dollars on the table in the dining saloon every night.”

[1]

The author is not responsible for dates. He relies upon local word-of-mouth tradition for all of them.

[2]

This is an exaggeration, probably for effect. He visited Buffalo in January 1937.—The Editor.

Gunboat Diplomacy

The port of New York has known strong seamen, but Comrade Osterhahnsen, an A.B. whom I once met at the International Seamen’s Club, is the only one who ever held a 3,000-ton ship for twelve hours with his feet. The I.S.C. was an exceedingly militant organization, a forerunner of the CIO maritime union.

“Because of the size of my feet,” said Comrade Osterhahnsen told me, as he got outside of a bowl of chili and rice, “I am on the capitalist blacklist; but no matter—I struck a great blow for our industry that morning in Dakar on the old Anthony Roosevelt.

“I signed articles for that voyage in New York. The captain he says ‘usual articles,’ and I, what knows ’em by heart, signed without reading. Then we got to sea and I found they had cut the wages $5.

“But as luck would have it, when I grabbed that ship I had one pair of shoes to my name, and they was in pretty bad shape. All cracked they was with salt water and the soles wore off on the cobbles of South Street. So a couple of weeks out I went to the slop chest to buy some new shoes. And I wear size 13. They didn’t have my size in stock.

“So I knew I had ’em. The ship’s officers, I mean. We unloaded our cargo in Dakar and we was just about to weigh anchor. I didn’t stir a foot. ‘Turn out,’ says the boatswain. ‘I will,’ I says, ‘when the slop chest stocks to fit me.’

“The old man was swearing like a black-hearted slave of the capitalist system, which he was, and he says, ‘We’ll miss this tide and lose twelve hours. I’ll put you ashore, and let you stew with the natives,’ he says.